It's not very clear to me when or where I actually started my world trip, but now I'm in Senegal.

After saying goodbye to all in England and France, I travelled down through Spain visiting friends and family in Barcelona, Minorca, Nerja and Seville. There's only one ferry a week from Cadiz to Tenerife and, apart from leaving half a hour before I arrived, was fully booked until the end of October anyway. So I flew.

Spent a week or so with friends and hunted for a boat to Brazil. Always the same answer: "much too early". The trade winds start in October or November and that's when most people go. Understandable. Still, I kept on asking around the various ports on Tenerife: Puerto Colón, Los Cristianos, Santa Cruz… tried La Gomera, then took the ferry to Gran Canaria which compounded the repugnant yuckiness of naming itself the "Bonanza Express" by translating "No pasar en navegation" (meaning "no exit while ship is under way" given the position of the sign) as "no trespassing at sea".

At Agaete, this insult to what must be the noblest profession on earth was counterbalanced by a rare delight: Mozart reincarnated as a bus-driver. Music to our rears. The bus itself was one of those sumptuously comfortable Dutch ones that seem to glide about like a hovercraft, but it wasn’t that, it was his breathtaking driving and low-key charisma. From the narrow, winding lanes leading out of the port to the maze of streets designed for sleepy donkeys, he wove through them all with elegance and economy, speed and safety, the fore-end of the bus lurching round corners, scything pavements with as little clearance as it gave shops, stalls and walls, and all the while kept up correspondence with what seemed to be the entire island community, stopping to kiss babies or discuss medical matters, and using his horn as telekinetic handshake, making for a socially-rich but bloody noisy ride, but still the most pleasurable I’ve ever had.

At Las Palmas, I eventually found a boat going to Dakar. The idea became: Dakar, Cabo Verde, Brazil. Patrick, the owner, is an experienced seaman: in a matter of minutes he has the sails set for a north-easterly, and for the next 8-9 days I have little or nothing to do except the minor manoeuvre he could do perfectly well without me, or cook or wash up. I am spared this by a greater evil: Simon the would-be world wanderer gets seasick! From biscuits to breakfast to bile, it all comes up in a series of bitter, nose-filling explosions. And goes on for days. Lying down eyes closed seems to help, but so many things trigger it off: the heave of the sea, the bobbing about on slippery hills of water, going down into the sweltering cabin (he does not seem to be particularly concerned about ventilation, and two men rationed to a bottle of water per person for ablutions in a hot climate should give an idea of the "colourful" atmosphere we lived in)…

At night, I fall asleep and let my semi-circular canals and turbid psyche fight it out among themselves: fear of falling overboard? fear of the inconceivable vastness of the ocean? Eventually, I no longer need the boat to stop moving and can accept the ten-foot-plus swell with nonchalance, even pleasure, and the promises of never setting foot in a boat again fade away as the sea-miles become more clement, the attacks milder and recovery faster. I am on watch from 2 am till dawn. I sit in the cockpit and look at the stars, see Venus rising, the moon waning, and try to recognise the various constellations. One of them looks vaguely like a scorpion, another one could be Ursa Major, but the order of brightness is wrong, and another one resembles the base of the Eiffel Tower, not a particularly useful astronomical observation... By the end of the week, because of heavy cloud cover, I still haven't pin-pointed the North Star.

Occasionally I see a cargo ship, but they're rare in these waters. The world looks very empty. Then comes a snort and a flash of phosphorescence and a school of dolphins joins the boat. Dolphins have about the highest cuddlability index of all animals, ranking close to kinkajous and koalas. They are smiling, social and playful, they're easily trained and get on well with humans. Maybe they are playing as they swim beneath, around and in front of the boat with a grace that any human swimmer would envy. Maybe. Maybe it's something of their own understanding, an aquatic ritual to the god of hydraulic thrust. Who knows?

During the day, big fish eat little fish but none of them bite the trail bait, except for the time that something very heavy (the one that got away) plucked a hook from the line and resulted in yet another meal of pasta. One day, we saw a shark. At times, presumably feeding-times, there's a mini maelstrom and bonitos leap out of the sea. Something's chasing them, maybe bigger tuna, but we never see what. The only hunters we see are the odd tern darting about hopefully. They seem to live on a very low-calorie diet…

Conversation is wearing a bit thin. Patrick is like an electric monkey with a laugh. He's loved sailing since he was six and seems to know the subject inside out. He is also a good teacher. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything (and everyone) related to the sea. He has good survival skills in the material sense, can cook, do all types of repair and odd jobs, has what seems to be a clear grasp of current affairs and politics, is helpful and friendly, but I don't find it easy to get on with him. Too technical. He has a very strong emotional barrier around him. Introspection = emotional masturbation… So he laughs. He laughs like a dog barks.

At last, after nine days we see land: les Mamelles de Dakar, the Breasts of Dakar, two hillocks near the tip of the peninsula, which I was to find symbolised the main interest most Europeans had in the country. The wind dropped to a feather-tickler and we ended up using the motor to arrive before pitch-black nightfall. Gradually, shapes emerged out of the levelling obscurity of distance. The strange-shaped island seaward of Les Almadies turns out to be the fore-end of a tanker left to rust itself out of danger. Cliffs made of twisted basalt, splattered with guano and topped with grass as green as Ireland. Buzzing around on mosquito outboards, a multitude of fishing vessels force us to widen our route and avoid their nets. With gibbets dangling over the sides like arms of mechanical insects, trawlers thunder off in a blaze of electricity to hunt the banks of tuna or shrimp further out. And a tiny fillet of yellow moon lays dappled light across the sea. Somewhere near the island of Gorée, a time-rusted link in the chain of slave transit to the New World, I hear the faint whisper of a muezzin. Closer in come the smells: first, one of grilled fish, then peanuts, honey, nutmeg, then fried bananas.

There are two yacht clubs here, the ADP and CVD. We're in the first. Virtually all non-Senegalese here are French. Met Jacques, an ex up-market car concessionaire with blue eyes, great sense of humour, inexhaustible taste for marriage, and a son who came home one day to commit suicide. Interesting character, but overdose after a while. He knows everyone and vice versa. Through him, I met Bernard, a Frenchman who teaches English, French and Spanish, currently trying to set up a new school in post-civil-war Guinea Bissau, and Eric who is doing his military service as an agronomist.

Driving into town this morning, my taxi-driver points out the cause of a minor traffic jam: a man sitting next to a broken moped beside the road. "Hit by a taxi" he announced as we cruised past. No-one seemed at all concerned. The other vehicle had driven on. Do things such as "accident report forms", claims, civil liability or insurance even exist here? He just sat there, knees bent under his chin, with an immense look of sadness and fatality in his eyes. I cannot help the whole of Africa. Does that mean I should help none? Shielded by the taxi, I drove on to the Institut Pasteur for yet another dose of protection. Oh dear. Will I ever let go?

Afterwards, I wandered around and came to the Museum of African Art. It was deserted. I bought a ticket and got two: one for 2000 CFA (£2), and the other for 200. Does that mean that one of them went into a private kitty?

I stayed on Patrick's boat for a couple of days more, then decided to move out. Through Jacques and Bernard, I met Abdoulaye, a fisherman with many fingers in many pies who offered me a room in his house. The room itself is very squalid by European standards - damp, cracked walls, ill-fitting door, no window, not too many insects - but not for Senegalese. At night it's like a sauna. The rental agreement is rather vague: it's free, you can give what you like, I can pay for the electricity in the room… Whatever.

I end up buying a foam mattress, it works out at one week’s rent, and even then it’s too much, in two days it’s hard as a biscuit. But in fact I don’t really care. If I came here in the first place, it wasn’t to stay at home.

Despite his being very autocratic and bossy, I like Abdoulaye a lot. So far, his house has about 20+ rooms and 30+ occupants, including mother, brother, five of his own kids, dozens of others, tenants, etc. He's planning on another six or so rooms on the roof. The toilet is standard squat and hope for the best type, in between the goat pen and the shower (bucket on the floor). At night a torch is indispensable.

Lunch was Senegal's traditional dish: thièboudienne, fish with rice. There are various other ingredients, some sort of leaf, sweet potato, grilled onion, a selection of sauces and a portion of crunchy grilled rice and, for the brave, spicy sauce.

An hour or so later, Abdoulaye came out with another fish, baked, on a banana leaf. Being a host is taken very seriously here. The fish was very nice, but I found it hard to imitate Abdoulaye’s rummaging around the intestines.

The cats here are lean stalkers, not your strokable European moggy. After the fish, I let what appeared to be a fragile two-week-old kitten lick my fingers and nearly lost them. The dogs, on the other hand, are mangy and diseased.

Dinner was what I would have once called sludge or muck. It was fish in a very liquid broth of millet. Eating in the dark helped. Generally, though, the food here is excellent. The bottled water is relatively repulsive but the tap water is drinkable. My favourite drink is bissap, which I'm pretty sure is chilled hibiscus flower infusion, and I also like bouy (I think it’s called), a rather thick and very sweet juice extracted from the baobab fruit.

Acclimatisation is moving along gradually. Awoke in the middle of the night to the rumblings heralding a new population of intestinal fauna. All the doors leading anywhere useful seemed locked and urgency started converting to panic. Fortunately, the front door was open and I was then able to give the performance known as the hundred yards dash of zero-displacement familiar to all victims of alternative cuisine. The aim is to get "there" as fast as colonically possible without jolting the tube into action. There are never any prizes.

In the mornings, I go the corner shop and buy breakfast. Five p will buy me a spoonful of Nescafé in a tiny plastic bag. Next stop, bread for sixpence ha’penny, then N’dayefatou (ten years old and already carrying 25 litres of water on her head) makes me coffee. "Without sugar" in Senegalese turns out to be three or four lumps, and "no, really, none at all" means only two…

Abdoulaye is a very hard-working and skilful craftsman. I've been watching him do repairs on his boat with a speed and precision defying non-mechanical competition. While banging in one nail with his right hand, his left is sorting and positioning the next. He makes his own caulking with a mixture of petrol, expanded polystyrene and sawdust.

The other evening, he asked me if there were flies in Europe. Perhaps his frequent contact with Europeans has made him aware of our obsession with them. He couldn't understand where the problem was so I tried to explain. But how do you tell someone of the medical risks when they've lived knee-deep in the beasts all their life and hardly ever been sick. As far as he's concerned, mosquitoes will only give malaria to people who are lazy or cold. Another day, I saw him crush a lizard an inch or two long and asked him why. They're quite harmless, he told me, but their urine is poisonous and it could get in your food…

Went to the salt delta of Siné Saloum with Bernard, Eric and Saliou, a friend of B's. Interesting pot-holes in the road. Spent two days haggling the hire of a canoe and meeting Saliou's fathers and mothers and brothers and (yum-yum) sisters. By the time I was introduced to the fourth father I was getting rather perplexed. Basically, any uncle or aunt is considered as a father or mother, and so on.

Went for a walk in the palm grove then came to a strange sort of halt. We couldn't go any further because of the devil. He often leaves packages of clothes or such things in the path to trap people so he can do something evil to them.

We went back to the dance instead. Extraordinary colours and music and sudden excursions from their seats around the dust-floor from young women looking for a husband. They dance partly bent down, head raised and eyes gazing blindly at the sky wobbling their copious bottoms at the drummers or audience, and occasionally pairing up to compare or synchronise hip movements and at times, according to Bernard who's been here for a long time and seems to know the country well, to masturbate.

Apropos, the most popular merchandise in Dakar seems to be sex - chocolate coating with fuchsia filling. If you're a toubab, a white, you are by definition rich and attractive. Physical degeneracy through age or alcohol abuse is no barrier. Even the most seemingly balanced men are happy to announce prices paid and services offered. For longer-term relations, dinners start in tête-à-tête, progress to accompaniment by one member of the family and end up by feeding the five thousand. There are quite a few odd characters here in Dakar. For many, it's a cheap place to retire. Heat, procrastination and drink do the rest. Others seem to thrive, know the country, learn the one of the many languages (Wolof, Serere, Diola, Mandingo, Bambara…) and fit in. Not many though.

I met Philippe at the CVD, a nice lad travelling about on his own. We seem to get on well and, without overtly discussing it, start negotiating crossing the Atlantic together. He was a trainee jockey at fifteen, moved on to become a riding-instructor, set up his own school, worked long and hard for several years then sold up and bought a boat. His boat is very well organised, I like that. The more we talk, the more we find we have in common. He wants to go to Brazil too (yes, when the trade winds pick up) and’s going to Casamance in southern Senegal while waiting. Perhaps I’d like to go too? Could be a good idea to find out whether we’ll get on well enough before the 3-to-4-week crossing. We agree on a contribution towards costs, buy provisions and, as soon as the wind’s right, off we go.

Those who’ve been reading attentively will know what’s coming up next. Next time, I’ll take a taxi, the train, roller-blades, I’ll even take the bus…

Talking of boats… Dinghies are little things used to go ashore, visit your neighbour’s wife while your neighbour’s gone ashore, etc. They come in various shapes and sizes: inflatable, fold-up, clinker-built, and so on and so forth. There are also those you buy when you only weigh six stone. These ones are small, light and bloody awkward when you shove a lump of plump like me in it. If, on top of that, you have a "pair" of salvaged oars (recycling is very laudable, I’m sure. Philippe is one of the rare sailors genuinely meriting the name "skipper", most of his rigging and other nautical appurtenances came out of them, and nothing gets thrown away. His boat looks like a magnetic hedgehog freshly escaped from an ironmonger’s: strapped, tied or bolted to any available space on deck is an unbelievable collection of maritime junk, including the soggiest spare boom ever seen cloud-side of sea-level. Press it and it dribbles, lift up one end and it bends.) (where was I, something about salvaged oars) whose only similarity was their colour. Now try and imagine your sweet and lovely correspondent - the only person known to capsize a futon - responsible for the life of an increasingly hysterical passenger in a four foot two and a quarter inch tub with one five-foot oar (blue) and another (also blue, it helps) three foot six whose oarlocks are positioned high for the ocean wave while we are speeding downstream on the flattest of estuaries and trying to reach a yacht that cannot be seen in darkest Africa’s night-time gloom because nobody’s left a light on board. Imagine that, then add the bickering. Going round in circles? Whaddya mean: going round in circles. To the left? Your left or mine? What canoe? Ouch! Why didn’t you tell me? What’s that bloody tree doing there? Yes I know it’s a mangrove, that’s not the question, and so on. And if we prune all the naughty words we spare ourselves a few pages of uncharitable portraiture and we really do calm down and we don’t make any disobliging comments about the totally unstable nature of the so-called ladder at the rear yes I know it’s called aft and you don’t say left either it’s starboard no it’s not it’s port that’s what I meant and what about some potatoes for dinner again and if this is what life on the briny deep is all about you can bloody well…

I’m not exactly sure why my skipper has opted for frugality. Is it because he’s poor? Whatever, the pleasure I felt on finding our shopping cost so little started to go a little sour. All systems have their own rules. Wastage, I found, was very much frowned upon. For example, before scurvy set in after four days at sea, I saw him do a shock-horror wistful double-take-and-unsuccessful-grab at the furry blue bread I lobbed overboard. I suppose we could have given it a good scrub with a wire brush, we might even have been able to eat the odd bit of it, after all, it’s only fungus. However, excluding any likelihood of finding a sign attached saying "eat me" and not really wanting to anyway, I still couldn’t see the point of giving mouth to mouth to a decomposing loaf when we had three others in a less advanced stage of saprophytic bioconversion. And the bananas! Cor blimey! Question: you have twenty bananas making up a spectrum ranging from firm and yellow to gungy and black. What do you do? Now, let’s say you had a disturbed childhood, you have what may under certain circumstances be considered a praiseworthy approach towards the elderly (interested parties should read "Granita" by Humberto Eco, both hands on the table please) or even, as the French say, a penchant towards the necrophilic (not all good things come to an end, certainly not to a sticky one), you may in that case enjoy the most dark and deliquescent bananas whenever you want since - as everyone knows, satiation comes quickly with bananas - the next one will have ample time to reach its necrotic apotheosis for another filthy, perverted, disgusting encounter in a sordid King’s Cross hotel the following day. Me, if I may be perfectly up-front and unambiguous, I like my bananas firm and unsullied. Give me an honest upright banana any day. What I mean by this is either you throw the dodgy one away and eat relatively healthy fruit, or you keep it and you’re forever eating food that should be nursing maggots.

So, here we are in lovely Casamance. Philippe knows it well, he’s been here before. He’s got loads of things to show me.

Next morning, someone knocks on the hull. No, no fish thank you. But Casamance has other interesting harvests.

Shit.

For two days, my would-be tour-guide is brain-dead, mind completely vitrified. He sinks into the vastness of stupidity, becomes narrow-minded and petty. The third day is spent trying to extract himself from a narcoleptic hangover. My patience is wearing very thin.

Day 4. Things start bad. They get worse. And worse. We start arguing and it really pisses me off because without the grass I really like him. With it, and despite his protestations that it made him "open", he turned into an idiot. I became bitter and probably rather spiteful. All very nasty. As he said: that’s how love stories come to an end.

I leave and next thing I know I’m in the bush. At last, Africa. It’s beautiful. Surrounded by tall grass as far as I can see, I walk, walk, walk, and sweat. I stop at a stream for a drink. Since arriving, I’ve been trying to get my body used to the local microflora. So far so good. The water is clear and tastes slightly earthy, clayish - we’ll see.

I meet a couple of lads who seriously manage to put the wind up me: the rebels! the independence fighters! "It’s alright for us, we’re African, we know our way around, but you, a white man! They’ll make mincemeat of you, they’ll kill you, you don’t realise, look, come with us, we’re going to Ziguinchor, it’s safe there, but you mustn’t stay out here in the wild, it’s very dangerous…" and so on. I thank them for their concern, but carry on. And yet... and yet I can’t honestly say I feel perfectly at ease. What do I know about the political situation out here? And what’s the value of a total stranger’s life, a white man’s life? White men are rich… No, I don’t feel at ease at all.

Night begins to fall and I need somewhere to lie down out of the way. But how do I cover the elephantine tracks I’ve left behind? I don’t - too bad.

I flatten myself a bedsit and lie down. About me, birds with brilliant coloured plumage, a gunmetal grey sky, and far-off rumblings of thunder. Apart from that, silence. Time to sleep.

The drums start. I’d already seen their like, tree-trunks hollowed out from a slit a yard long and two inches wide. But this isn’t music, it’s African internet and I haven’t got the foggiest what they’re saying. It stops. Silence. It starts again. Silence. Silence.

When it came, the attack was terrible. The Mout-Mout. I try to hide, I swaddle and mummify myself in clothes, towels, pareo, spare socks, second tee-shirt, anything to protect me. The night was long. But not without its advantages for this was when I started inventing and designing the ultimate multi-purpose safari suit. Designed for the enterprising explorer and superannuated boy scout, this fully modular zip-and-Velcro garment made from anti-static, rip-proof, breathable, waterproof fabric can be worn respectively as shorts, waistcoat, trousers, jacket (sleeves and/or leggings/gaiters with reinforced knee and elbow padding supplied), mini-umbrella hood with mosquito-net visor and telescopic frame allowing the user to sleep with his (or her) head resting on any surface and keep the net off the face at all times, mosquito-net mittens, selection of inner and outer pockets (passport, wallet, fags and lighter (have to be commercial these days), Swiss army knife, whistle, etc.), and provide its wearer with full protection against mosquitoes, midges, horseflies, bluebottles, wasps, bees, centipedes, millipedes, lizards, leopards, okapis, nuclear fallout and premature baldness and thus save not only the cost but also the weight of mosquito-net, pyjamas/sheets, tent and, thanks to its novel system of cunningly positioned slits, permit a very wide range of sexual permutations (catalogue in plain envelope on request) excluding zoophily (zips and hooves…) and heavy-duty flagellation which could wear out the waterproofing.

Eventually I fall asleep and, likewise, eventually I wake up, knackered. No rebels, no civil war, no breakfast. A few hours later, I meet Honoré, rice-grower and speed walker, who informs me that my route (including minor excursions up to my knees into his paddies) would take me straight into a mangrove swamp and not necessarily out of it. I follow him. His village has the most aggressive waddle of ducks I have ever encountered. I am introduced to Amadou and Mamadou, two refugees from the Guinea Bissau border area and, as is the age-old custom in this beautiful country, was invited to lunch. I did try, I really did, all the more so since it tasted good. I don’t have the exact recipe, but it involved the conjunction of seeds from various trees and lots of sugar to produce an orangy-yellow mixture of heavy, thick and fibrous repair-kit for glass-fibre boats. The next stage was to put some in the mouth, extract the immediately biodegradable part by squashing it against the palate with the tongue while sucking at it forcefully, followed by spitting or scraping out the residual fibres and oil-palm seeds. It’s not "you don’t talk with your mouth full", it’s "you can’t".

I spent an hour or so talking with Mamadou, a very interesting man, and was then raced off beneath a Bunsen sky through miles of bright green paddy and fields of fresh mint to find a bus, a room for the night, the island of Carabane and the Joola, the boat taking me back to Dakar. By now I’d decided to give up on crossing the Atlantic by sail, not because of the spontaneous evacuations, but I got a bit fed up with depending on other people.

One last and unforgettable image before leaving. The Joola arrives, very late, and all hell lets loose. A dozen canoes career off and try to moor alongside simultaneously, each one trying to wedge the others out of the way and disembark its passengers before losing its place to the next. For the moment, it’s like the turnstiles at Twickenham. The scrummage is about to begin: there’s a couple of hundred passengers who’ve managed to scramble on and a couple of hundred who want to get off. They have an opening about eight foot wide in which to do so. But! Everyone is waiting for their baggage that couldn’t be off-loaded with them. Everyone wants their baggage, they start clamouring, they start screaming for it, and there are mountains and mountains ranging from bales of dried fish weighing a tonne apiece to live chickens that can be tossed around with ease, monstrous parcels that threaten to come apart at the seams but never do, wooden crates tied up with string, broad dishes covered with cloth to protect the family dinner along with primuses, plastic bags of sliced mangoes and foam mattresses for the night, 50-kg bags of Thai rice (yes, Casamance is Senegal’s major rice-producing region, maybe the bag’s Thai and the rice’s Senegalese?), suitcases, trunks, grannies, banana trees (real ones, with earth on the roots too) and, above all, my rucksack - and they want it NOW. I have never, ever seen pandemonium like this in my life. For a half an hour or so, I float like a feather in the human tornado (it’s called "experience"), shunted from one place to another, trodden on, clambered over, knocked down, mesmerised by the hallucinating hive of absolutely unproductive industry around me. Suddenly, I glimpse the "steward" pick up a palm-leaf mat, roll it up and, lips literally flecked with foam, flail into the crowd in a tragically futile attempt to create order. Time to go. I’m sure I’ll get my rucksack back later.

Africa is extraordinary, far too daunting for a quick visit. I’ll go back.

That’s all for now, back soon